In his Congressional testimony last week in Washington, Fed
Chairman Ben
Bernanke took time to downplay the significance of the few
dissenting voices on the Fed's Open Market Committee (FOMC).
Those statements, combined with an even more dovish statement by
Fed Vice Chairman Janet Yellen earlier this week, clearly
reaffirm the Fed's indefinite commitment to $85 billion of
monthly quantitative easing. (It is surprising that those figures
failed to invoke the attention drawn by the $85 billion in annual
cuts detailed in the "sequester"). But the stock markets have
gotten the message loud and clear and are setting records on a
daily basis. The apparent triumphs of the Federal Reserve in
pumping up stock and real estate prices, without triggering a
sell-off in the dollar or easily visible inflation, have not been
lost by observers around the world.

Many have dubbed the last decade or so to be an era of easy
money. As it turns out, that characterization may have been
premature. Based on the new crop of central bankers who are
primed to take control of the world's financial system, the age
of truly easy money may be just getting started.

Many expect that when Bernanke's term expires in January 2014, he
will be succeeded by the dovish Yellen. But that's just the
beginning. In short order, a host of serial money printers will
take up the reins at the world's most important central banks.

In January of this year Canadian banker Mark
Carney, a committed Keynesian, was selected to replace
Mervyn
King as the Governor of the Bank
of England in July 2013. Despite a native population of some
63 million people to draw from, the UK's so-called Conservative
government has now, for the first time in its history, selected a
foreigner to run the Bank. At a salary of some $1,200,000 a year,
he will be earning more than that of the heads of the Fed and the
ECB combined. Undoubtedly Carney can command such a salary
because he can be relied upon to create synthetic Sterling along
the lines of Bernanke. Already he is talking of increasing the
UK's two percent upper inflation limit.

In a further effort to distort the value of money, the Deputy
Director of the Bank of England, Paul Tucker, spoke recently of
his idea to engineer negative interest rates. All this is to hold
reality at bay.

Plagued by over a decade of economic stagnation, Japan has
recently elected Shinzo Abe as prime minister, who has virtually
promised the most expansionist monetary policy in the developed
world. Shinzo made good on his campaign promises by selecting Mr.
Haruhiko Kuroda as the next Governor of the Bank of Japan. He is
yet another major Keynesian monetary expansionist in the Bernanke
mold. The likelihood of extraordinary policy moves in Japan
increased with the subsequent nomination of Kikuo Iwata for
deputy governor. This week Mr. Iwata told legislators that he
favors revisions to Japanese law that would require the Bank of
Japan to achieve inflation targets set by the government, or face
revocation of its charter. With a national debt already
accounting for more than 200 percent of GDP, Japan is prepared to
go into uncharted territory.

At the ECB, the well-known Keynesian monetary expansionist and
creator of limitless synthetic euros, Mario Draghi, remains
firmly ensconced in office. Indeed, he appears to be overcoming
German-inspired austerity measures in the Eurozone. Further, the
so-called 'Troika' of the International Monetary Fund, the
European Commission and the ECB, appears to be retreating from
its initial Germanic demands for economic austerity and stronger
banks.

In retrospect, events of the past few months illustrate a serious
spread of Bernanke's policies across the entire developed world.
I believe that we are headed for a period of massive asset booms,
followed by a debt and bank collapse of unprecedented ferocity.

John Browne is a Senior Economic Consultant to Euro
Pacific Capital. Opinions expressed are those of the writer,
and may or may not reflect those held by Euro Pacific Capital, or
its CEO, Peter
Schiff.